Two top-10 finishers disqualified for cheating

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Two women from Mexico City who finished in the top 10 at Sunday's Marine Corps Marathon have been disqualified after missing a checkpoint on the course.

Race director Rick Nealis decided yesterday to remove them from the results after a query by The Washington Times shortly after the race.

"Right now, they're not seventh and eighth any longer," he said.

The two women -- Pilar Paras and Consuelo Visoso -- had identical finishing times of 3:07:44. The 34-year-old Visoso would have placed third in the 30-34 age group. But neither Visoso nor Paras recorded a split at 20 miles.

Their split times at five miles (34 minutes), 10 miles (59 minutes) and 23.5 miles (2:27) made little sense, either. The winner, Laura Thompson, passed 23.5 miles firmly in the lead in just under 2:37.

The last time a runner was eliminated from the top 10 was in 2002, when the Marines outed Chandra Bozelko of Orange, Conn., for cutting the course after she crossed the finish line ninth among the women in 3:07:15.

Two Mexican men also were purged from the results for missing the 20-mile checkpoint. Jose Visoso Del Valle and Alvaro Altamirano also finished in 3:07:44 and recorded unusual split times. Their splits indicated they led the race at the five-mile mark in an exceptionally fast 24:07 and 24:09, respectively, when in fact the clear-cut leader at that time -- Jared Nyamboki -- ran 25:37.

Del Valle, 65, would have won the 65-69 age group by nearly 30 minutes if his time had been legitimate.

Del Valle also ran in the 2004 New York City Marathon with Paras and Visoso, and Altamirano joined the three at the Chicago Marathon last year. The women finished those races in four to five hours.

Back in 1997, two Mexican runners were disqualified for missing check points.

Robert Villanueva of Baltimore and Tim Mullen of Timonium, Md., were disqualified for the same reason as Del Valle and Altamirano, posting five-mile splits ahead of Nyamboki in 21:35 and finishing together in 3:51:30.

Nealis said it would be several days before the results are cleansed of participants who cheated. Last year, several hundred entrants were disqualified for cutting the 26.2-mile course.